WHY SYMMETRY GETS REALLY INTERESTING WHEN IT IS BROKEN
A hypothetical alien visitor, sent to observe all of human culture – art and architecture, music and medicine, storytelling and science – would quickly conclude that we as a species are obsessed with patterns. The formal gardens of 18th-century England, the folk tales of medieval Germany and the traditional woven fabrics of Mayan civilisation have little in common, but they each owe their aesthetic appeal to being composed of smaller, identical parts arranged into a harmonious whole.
Read moreAMAZON SPENT CLOSE TO $23B ON R&D IN 2017, OUTPACING FELLOW TECH GIANTS
Amazon powered its prolific 2017, which saw the release of a cavalcade of new products and services, with $22.6 billion in spending on research and development, tops among U.S. companies. According to data from FactSet first reported by Recode, Google parent Alphabet came in second in R&D spending in 2017 at $16.6 billion, followed by Intel at $13.1 billion, Microsoft at $12.3 billion and Apple at $11.6 billion.
Read moreTHIS CHINESE FACIAL RECOGNITION SURVEILLANCE COMPANY IS NOW THE WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE AI STARTUP
SenseTime Group has raised $600 million from Alibaba Group Holding (baba) and other investors at a valuation of more than $3 billion, becoming the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup. Source: fortune.com
INTRODUCING KAYENTA: AN OPEN AUTOMATED CANARY ANALYSIS TOOL FROM GOOGLE AND NETFLIX
Speed and scalability bottlenecks: For organizations like Google and Netflix that run at scale and that want to perform comparisons many times over multiple deployments in a single day, manual canary analysis isn’t really an option. Even for other organizations, a manual approach to canary analysis can’t keep up with the speed and shorter delivery time frame of continuous delivery. Configuring dashboards for each canary release can be a significant manual effort, and manually comparing hundreds of different metrics across the canary and baseline is tiresome and laborious.
Read moreIS IT TIME FOR QUANTUM COMPUTING STARTUPS? MAYBE
That was the message of the Q Summit, a one-day meeting of quantum computing researchers, investors, and entrepreneurs hosted by IBM in Menlo Park, Calif., last week. Source: ieee.org
WHY SQLITE DOES NOT USE GIT
SQLite does not use the Git version control system. SQLite uses Fossil instead. Fossil and Git are both block-chain version-control systems. They are both ‘distributed’. They both store content as a sequence of immutable check-ins identified by a cryptographic hash. Git is wildly popular, to the point that many younger developers are familiar with nothing else. And yet, the developers of SQLite prefer Fossil. This article tries to explain why.
Read moreTHIS APP FEATURES SUPER-ACCURATE GPS, AND I CAN’T FIGURE OUT HOW IT WORKS
Smartphone GPS is usually only accurate to about 4m (13 feet), so the idea of a smartphone navigation app capable of much more accurate spatial resolution piqued my interest enough to try it out. Then it got me wondering how the whole thing works. Source: arstechnica.com
THE FDA WON’T LET THESE FARMERS CALL THEIR SKIM MILK ‘SKIM MILK’
The FDA is forcing this small dairy to either add synthetic vitamins to its skim milk, or call it ‘imitation’ skim milk. Source: vice.com
DIFFERENTIABLE PLASTICITY: A NEW METHOD LEARNING TO LEARN
Neural networks, which underlie many of Uber’s machine learning systems, have proven highly successful in solving complex problems, including image recognition, language understanding, and game-playing. However, these networks are usually trained to a stopping point through gradient descent, which incrementally adjusts the connections of the network based on its performance over many trials. Once the training is complete, the network is fixed and the connections can no longer change; as a result, barring any later re-training (again requiring many examples), the network in effect stops learning at the moment training ends.
Read moreNASA X-PLANE CONSTRUCTION BEGINS
To that end, NASA on April 2 awarded a $247.5 million contract to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, Calif., to build the X-plane and deliver it to the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California by the end of 2021. Source: nasa.gov